The book provides an assessment of the contribution of pronoun omission to the complexity and efficiency of varieties of English and the influence of language contact on its attestation and pervasiveness. On the one hand, omitted pronouns result in simpler and more efficient structures, provided their antecedents are retrievable from the context. On the other hand, the choice between overt and omitted pronouns depends on several grammatical constraints, which in turn may entail an increase in system complexity. Two methodologically different but complementary case studies are presented, which contribute new findings to the literature at the crossroads of research on World Englishes, complexity, efficiency, and pronoun omission.

This volume includes eleven papers pertaining to different areas of linguistics and organised into three sections. Part I contains diachronic studies which cover data from Middle English to Present-Day English and which explore phenomena such as the status of extender tags, the distribution of free adjuncts, post-auxiliary ellipsis, and the use of 'ephemeral' concessive adverbial subordinators. Part II comprises studies on grammar and language processing dealing with topics such as the interaction between syntactic and structural complexity and verbal agreement with collective subjects, the influence of distributivity and concreteness on verbal agreement, the interaction of complexity and efficiency in pronoun omission in Indian English and Singapore English, and the methods and approaches used for grammar teaching in modern EFL/ESL textbooks. Finally, Part III revolves around lexis, discourse and pragmatics, with papers that discuss the development of the discoursal representation of social actors in Argentinian newspapers after the military dictatorship, the construction of women's gender identity through positive and negative emotions in women's magazines, and spelling-to-sound correspondence on Twitter.